By Gary Deane
The term film noir made its debut in the late 1930s,
first used by a conservative French press distressed by the number of
dispiriting narratives and displays of questionable morality darkening domestic
movie screens for nearly a decade. Having had enough of doomed men
obsessed with little more than money and sex and women too vulgar to qualify as
femmes fatales, one inflamed reviewer assailed the movies as “sordid and
bestial noir, with characters who are black down to the third basement of their
soul.”
By that time, the
critical storm around such films — ranging from Jean Renoir’s corrosive La
Chienne (The Bitch, 1930) to Pierre Chenals’ cold-blooded Le
Dernier tournant (1939) — appeared to have come to a head. However, the unsparing
bleakness of many of the wartime and postwar releases to follow, such as Henri-George
Clouzot’s Le Corbeau (1943), Henri Decoin’s La Fille du diable
(1946), Clouzot’s Quai des Orfèvres (1947), and Yvés Allegret’s Manèges
(1950), only served to add fuel to the fire — as did a later cycle of films
noir even less graced by pathos. These — including Jacques Becker’s Touchez
pas au grisbi (1954), Jules Dassin’s Du Rififi chez les hommes (1955),
and Jean-Pierre Melville’s Bob le flambeur (1956) — reviewers would
vilify for their indecent glorification of conspicuous consumption and cheap
gangsters in two-toned Cadillacs. (1)
Just as unhelpful would
be a group of influential young cinephiles and film-makers, known as
the Nouvelle Vague (New Wave). Prominent
among them were Francois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, and Claude Chabrol. While admiring
of American popular culture — especially the hard-boiled and ‘suspense
thriller’ tradition, both in literature and film — they were less enthusiastic
about most popular French moviemaking of the classic period, referring to it as the le
cinéma de papa and le cinéma de qualite. Among those named-and-shamed for a supposed
lack of personal and artistic conviction in their films were journeyman
directors Julien Duvivier, Henri Decoin, Henri Verneuil, Jean Delannoy, Andre
Cayatte, and Gilles Grangier, all of whom would come to be recognized, and in
some cases celebrated, for their contributions to the international film noir
canon.
Caught up in all this
very Gallic sucking-and-blowing was Michel Deville, a young director and
contemporary of the Nouvelle Vague, who’d worked under Henri Decoin on
several studio productions, including Razzia sur la chnouf (1955), a shimmering
noir starring Jean Gabin and Lino Ventura. Like Jean-Pierre Melville and Louis
Malle, Deville wanted to plot his own course, while also attempting to remain on
good terms with the modernists of the Nouvelle Vague. With his
apprenticeship behind him, Deville jumped at the chance to direct Une balle
dans le canon, based on a novel written by Albert Simonin whose books and film
adaptations (including Touchez pas au grisbi), had been embraced by audiences
with an appetite for big-shouldered polars (crime thrillers) and policiers
(police procedurals).
Une balle’s storyline satisfies the hunger for both. Simonin’s main characters, Dick (Roger Hanin) and his pal, Tony (Pierre Vaneck), veterans of the war in Indochina, have recently returned to Paris, bringing with them twenty-five million francs they’re to hand over to a local crime boss. However, hoping to get more out of the transaction than just a commission, the pair is talked into investing in a high-end cabaret, the ‘Club Tip-Tap’ on the understanding they can cash out if and when they want.
Unfortunately, the club’s owner, Pépère (Paul Frankeur), who’d persuaded them to come in with him, soon after informs the pair that if they want see their money again, they’re going to have to pull a job for him. He says he’ll split the proceeds, but the two suspect he has other plans. Tony is ready to be done with it all and just disappear. Dick, the more headstrong of the two, says that at this point, there’s no turning back — not for them or for Tony’s guileless girlfriend, Brigitte (Mijanou Bardot), who happens to be the robbery target’s daughter.
Roger Hanin, a fierce
charmer both on and off the screen, is in his element in Une balle. Often
portraying a take-charge type not to be messed with, Hanin starred in movies
and popular French television series for more than five decades. Signature appearances
in classic noirs included those in Robert Hossein’s dire Les Salauds vont en
enfer (1955), the stylish Le Désordre et la nuit (1958), directed by
Gilles Grangier, and Jean Luc-Godard’s provocative New Wave pastiche, Breathless
(1960). Hanin’s partner-in-crime, Pierre Vaneck, was first introduced to French
filmgoers as ‘the new Gerard Philipe’ (Une si jolie petite plage, 1949)
and, like Hanin, would go on to star widely ‘across stage, screen, and television’.
Une balle was among Vaneck’s first films, one in which he showed he was well
capable of mustering more than just a pretty boy’s bland vigor.
Mijanou Bardot fares less
well. No more than a winsome presence, the younger sibling of Brigitte Bardot shows
only occasional flashes of her sister’s bombshell allure. Resembling more a
young Brigitte Fonda than she ever did la Bardot, Mijanou was never given
much of a chance to develop as an actress in her own right. Only in Eric
Rohmer’s lushly seductive La Collectionneuse (1967), do we get a sense of
her as the performer she might have been. Today, she’s generally best remembered
for her role as a frisky French exchange student in Albert Zugsmith’s exhilaratingly
bad Sex Kittens Go to College (1960), sharing the bill with the
likes of Mamie Van Doren and Tuesday Weld.
Otherwise, Une balle has a stellar supporting cast of soon-to-be French movie favorites: the waggish Jean Rochefort as the club’s bartender; Michel Lonsdale, as a dogged cop; and Paul Frankeur, as the gang’s chilling puppet-master, Pépère. Frankeur was a welcome fixture in Franco-noir, typically operating on one side of the law or the other. The beefy actor shared the screen with his friend Jean Gabin in more than a dozen films, and, later, with Lino Ventura in Jean-Pierre Melville’s elaborate thriller Le Deuxieme souffle (1966). However, the film’s special treat is the appearance of the great American jazz pianist, Hazel Scott, who showcases as the nightclub's featured artiste. (2)
Une balle dans la canon, a
film in which motives and actions are either suspect or unknown, was the right project
at the right time for Michel Deville, and a perfect launch point from which he
might make a few creative waves of his own. Aware that the enfants terribles
of the Nouvelle Vague already had the blood of his mentors on their
hands, Deville was not about to end up as collateral damage by making a film
for which he’d be skewered as un traditionaliste. Stylistically, Une
balle has a fair bit of nouveau showing, including the flamboyant
use of hand-held cameras, extreme close-ups, jump cuts, extended tracking
shots, and idiosyncratic editing. There’s a raw, graphic energy to the film and,
within its frames, moments of drama that are independent of the story.
Un balle
also avoids many of the narrative clichés which can cheapen genre thrillers — though
it remains the kind of movie whose succulent minor-key B movie refrains are generally
foreign to French productions, as well as to their international audiences who have
come to assume that all French films will be ‘works’ of something rather than something
that simply works. But then that’s the great conjuror’s trick. Much of classic
cinema was created not by self-styled artistes but by gifted artisans
and craftspersons as once might have labored on cathedrals.
Ironically, there’s a
case to be made that Michel Deville, while not really of the New Wave, was the
first director to put some of the formative thinking of its theorists into
action. Deville’s precocious debut would be released the year before Claude
Chabrol’s Le Beau Serge (1959), a film held up as the movement’s first
born. By default, it also can be argued that Une balle was the New
Wave’s first nod to film noir, only to be followed later by Godard’s Breathless
(1960) and Truffaut’s Shoot the Piano Player (1960). Deville would again
succumb to film noir’s siren call with Lucky Jo (1964), starring American
transplant Eddie Constantine as a hapless thief whose partners no longer want
to work with him. The movie, despite some fanciful mannerisms, remains a curiously
effective noir.
In time, Deville’s films
would take on a yet darker hue as he began exploring postmodernist tropes: the
relationship between memory and the past, the boundaries between reality and
fiction, and the transitory nature of love and attachment. His movies also
continued to engage provocatively with genre conventions. Dossier 51
(1978), a Kafkaesque police thriller — which uses a subjective camera to create
an aura of menace and paranoia — would win the French Syndicate of French Cinema
Critics Award for Best Film, as well as a César (the French Oscar) for Best
Screenplay.
Others, also crime-based,
are assaults on bourgeois double standards and hypocrisy. These hand-signed
noirs include: Le Mouton enragé (‘74) starring Jean-Louis Trintignant
and Romy Schneider; Eaux profondes (‘81) with Trintignant and Isabelle
Huppert; and Péril en la demeure (‘85), an emotionally-layered thriller
with Nicole Garcia, Richard Bohringer, and Michel Piccoli.
Looking down upon it all,
Deville’s one-time mentor, director Henri Decoin, would have been proud of his
one-time assistant — and very likely more than a little envious.
_____________________________________
(1)
Following WWII, the term ‘film noir’ was applied more equitably to a select
group of Hollywood releases unseen in France to that time. With their dream-like states, gloomy
romanticism, and transcendent male protagonists, movies such as This Gun for Hire (1942), Laura
(1944), Double Indemnity (1944), and Phantom Lady (1944), were viewed
as reflective of surrealist and poetic-realist traditions in French cinema, as
well as being grounded in what writer Nino Frank would call “the dynamism of
violent death.” So began what would become the near-universal association of ‘film
noir’ with American crime films.
(2) Hazel Scott, an Afro-American beauty and jazz pianist extraordinaire, fled to France after her marriage to US Congressman Adam Clayton Powell had fallen apart and appearances before the House Un-American Activities had derailed her career in the US. With her young son in tow, she sailed for France, joining the burgeoning American expatriate community in Paris. Her apartment on the Right Bank became a regular hangout for Americans in Paris, such as James Baldwin, Lester Young, Dizzy Gillespie, Max Roach, and musicians from The Count Basie and Duke Ellington bands. Scott began to appear in films, landing a memorable part as a nightclub manager and performer in Le Désordre et la nuit with Jean Gabin. A virtuoso performer with an awesome dexterity and expressiveness, she recorded an album in 1955 with Charles Mingus and Max Roach titled ‘Relaxed Piano Moods’. Downbeat magazine declared it one of the most important jazz recordings of the twentieth century and in 2001, it was added to NPR’s Basic Jazz Records Library. Scott returned to the US in the late ‘60’s but the music scene had no place for her. She continued to play in smaller clubs to a devoted fan base until her death in 1981.
(A longer version of this article appeared in NOIR CITY e-magazine)
